By pretending to be people that they are not, ideally, catfishers need to create a system of online attachments that have little to no connections to their real identity. In brief, if I, person A, want to pretend to be person B, I need to express interests, beliefs, values that belong to my idea of person B. Practically, as reported by various studies (Hartney 2018; Lamphere and Lucas 2019), they rarely do so: they instead manifest more traits that are similar to their own (so of person A) than intended. Let us take as an example the case of “Joan.” She turned out to be a male psychologist pretending to be a disabled female; the two sides of this person shared the yearning to explore female friendships in online environments (Ess 2012). Other more famous cases involved coaches that pretended to be friends and companions of players to motivate them to play better. In these situations, the hidden motivation for these deceptions moves both their online relationships and their offline lives. In this sense, we could find a more suitable comparison between catfishing profiles and avatars: they are both created to explore, extend, and exploit attachment of people that they could not easily explore in the offline dimension (Smith et al. 2017).
It is mentioned that "catfishers" want to create a system of online attachments that have little to no connections to their real identity. This is happening as the person behind the fake profile is worried about their acceptance from the other users. It is important for them their positive opinion and in this way, he/she is able to control the factors (this phenomenon is called self-presentation or impression management,Leary & kowalski, 1990; Schneider, 1991; Schlenker,1980)